Playing with this electoral map (and there are others — if your favorite plays better, good for you and it), the game I play is to expand the map to the largest Obama landslide that is feasible, if you figure he wins every state that he has ventured to campaign in. Then contract those ridiculous Obama states and a few less than ridiculous Obama states over to a plausible McCain victory.

The outsized Obama landslide is kind of interesting. He wins right down the Pacific Coast, right down the Atlantic Coast — with the exception of South Carolina, and right across the Canadian border — except for the tiny sliver of the Idaho panhandle. It is a rejoinder to the odd tactic a stripe of Republicans have of waving of the map for the last two presidential elections and pointing to all the red — the Republicans won the Land-mass contest going away. On a county-by-county level, another map shown in this same spirit, they probably still win that particular contest even in this ridiculous landslide, so I suppose they may well just hang up that map and beam proudly.

Then again, I can’t think of the name for the major metropolitan city of North Dakota. This line for this McCain campaign’s “brave face” memo is a laugher: Obama is running out of states if you follow out a traditional model. Today, he expanded his buy into North Dakota, Georgia and Arizona in an attempt to widen the playing field and find his 270 Electoral Votes. This is a very tall order and trying to expand into new states in the final hours shows he doesn’t have the votes to win. You can say a lot of negative things about the logic of Obama’s ND GA AZ buy — maybe it’s counterproductive and a waste of money, maybe it’s a feigning stunt — but this logic falls flat on the face of it. Incidentally, next Marc Ambinder post down, and… I suspect that the smallest amount of leaning on that massive undecided vote will put this to the expected Republican column.

The other interactive election feature worth looking at is the NY Times Endorsement history. They started as a Republican (as the Democrats were aligned with the Secessionist Party of the South — which, come to think of it, is about how they ended up back at the Democratic Party for the past forty years), moved into the sort of business-friendly Cleveland Demcoratic tradition, chaffed at William Jennings Bryan but hurtled through Wilson and the retro-Clevelandites who followed through the 1920s. And by they’ve endorsed every Democratic candidate for president since 1960.

Some high-lights: the pull-quote for 1964, which seems about right always. The fact that Franklin Roosevelt looks older in the photograph for 1936 than he does for the one for 1944. John Palmer, the Gold-Democrat alternate endorsed in 1896, and more specifically his beard. (I can’t quite come to the same judgement about 1904 Alton Parker’s mustache.) The 1968 endorsement of Hubert Humphrey, and strictly the pull-quote which many an “Obamacon” have revised, only with Agnew being crossed out and replaced with Palin. And the apologia for the pointless presidential campaign of 1988 against the supposed superior to the campaign of 1988.

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